Thursday Poem - October

October. Its brilliant festival of dry

and moist decay. Its spicy, musky scent.

The church's parking lot deserted

except for this one witness,

myself, just resting there.

Somewhere a radio plays Flamenco.

A spotlight of sunshine falls on the

scattered debris. Blood-red and gold,

a perfect circle of leaves begins to whirl,

slowly at first, keeping the pattern,

clicking against the blacktop

like heels and castanets,

then faster, faster, faster. . .

round as a ruffle, as the swirling

skirts of an invisible dancer.

Swept off into the tangled woods

by the muscular breeze.

The hoarse cheering of crows.

Inside the dark empty church,

long cool shadows, white-painted wood,

austere Protestant candles thriftily snuffed,

Perhaps a note on the altar,

Gone dancing. Back on Sunday

Dolores Stewart, from The Nature of Things

Wordless Wednesday - Singing Their Way Home

Happy October!

Village, Scarlet and Bokeh

In the village, scarlets, plums and deep inky blues are creeping into view, their emergence out of summer's dusty greens motivated by cooler evenings and gently ruffling winds at nightfall. When Beau and I potter off in the morning, there are glossy coins of dew everywhere. No frost yet though...

In summer, a small gasp of koi or nishikigoi (錦鯉, "brocaded carp") makes its home in the shaded pond underneath this Japanese maple, but the fish are about to be moved to indoor tanks for the winter, and when they go, the pond will be a different place. I didn't know until recently that a colony of koi is called a gasp. Beau and I visit the pond and her maple on morning walks until all her leaves have fallen, and the waters below her branches are covered with snow.

As often as we witness the turning of the seasons and the vivid entities coming into being, the morphing of the village into deeper and more intense hues always takes us (and the camera) by surprise.  Autumn transformations are magics of a wilder kind, and I can't imagine living this old life without being among them, watching as they flare and swirl and dance, blithely remaking the world in stunning elemental colors.

Northern light dazzles the eyes, and it lingers lovingly on everything it touches in its journey across the eastern Ontario highlands at this time of the year. I wish I could paint everything it touches. Come to think of it, that is just what my lens is doing. All I do is hold the camera and point it. 

Sequestered, Week 313 (CCCXIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from, this splitting open of the self.
It takes me by surprise. Not an awareness of beauty and mystery, but beauty and mystery themselves, flooding into a mind suddenly without boundaries. Can this be gladness, to be lifted by that flood?

This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

Nectar and Light

Friday Ramble - Oh, Those Cavorting Creepers

Days are warmish and sunny, and nights are downright cool. Some mornings, the grass in the park is a bit crunchy underfoot when we go out, but there hasn't been a killing frost in the village. In nearby rural areas, frost has already put an end to the growing season, and with October on the horizon, our turn is not far off. 

At the height of summer, we were on the trail into the woods a little after five in the morning, but the sun is not up until after seven these days, so we are later starting out. On chilly mornings, Beau wears his natty blue tartan jacket with its fleecy liner, and he is happy to do it.

I wear my green canvas jacket with a cotton turtleneck sweater underneath. Lacking much of a lining, the garment does not convey much warmth, but its deep hood and waxed surface shut out the wind and keep me dry in sudden showers. The garment has several deep pockets for items like glasses, keys, facial tissues, cell phone and poo bags, so taking a receptacle along for such things is not necessary. Women's coats seldom have enough pockets or deep enough pockets, and my topper is actually a man's jacket found on a clearance rack at Marshalls years ago. 

Wonder of wonders, here it is at last, the splendid performance put on every year by a cluster of Virginia creepers a few blocks from home. Most creepers in the area turn red and burgundy in late September, but this specimen does its own thing and dazzles the eyes with leaves in blazing orange and vivid teal. The hues on display are absolutely sumptuous, and every autumn, they gladden our hearts.

Nudged into action by sunny days and cooler nights, village trees have gotten the word and are throwing themselves joyously into what we (Beau and I) like to call hallelujah mode. Local maples cavort in flaming scarlet, birches and poplars wear buttery gold, and the beech sisters in the park delight our eyes in shimmering copper and bronze, all together a splendid seasonal coinage. On walks, we stop to look at the riches all around us, and it is a wonder we ever make it home again. 

Thursday Poem - Song for Autumn

In the deep fall
don’t you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees themselves, especially those with

mossy, warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come – six, a dozen –

to sleep inside their bodies? And don’t you

hear the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

Mary Oliver

Wordless Wednesday - Red

Creeping Autumn

On our morning walks, there are clear signals that seasonal changes are in the air. The persistent strands of Virginia creeper wrapping old wooden fences and stone walls and draping themselves around trees and shrubs were green a few days ago, and this morning many look more like Yuletide (or Christmas) paper, red and green and silvery in the early light. Where their supporting masonry gets direct sunlight during the day and retains a little heat at night, the vines are keeping their green a little longer, but they too are thinking about changing their colors.

Oak leaves are lightly touched with the splendid rosy bronze tint they wear in late September and early October before falling to earth, and beech leaves are already edged in coppery red and cognac. Leaf by leaf and branch by branch, maple trees in the eastern Ontario highlands are turning red.

One of my forestry references identifies our native beeches as just "common beeches", but to my mind, there is nothing common about the beech sisters in the village with their majestic height, silvery bark, dense foliage and rounded crowns. They are magnificent, and that is that.

Part of me wants to dance about and applaud the cooler temperatures and burnished, glorious colors coming into their own. Another part of me is dismayed at the prospect of cold weather, short days and long nights, of frost and an early autumn this time around. Fall should not arrive until early October, and then it ought to hang about until at least the end of November. 

Please Mama, not yet........ Gift us with several more weeks of sun and warmth and gentle breezes, no ingathering and Arctic nights for a while longer.

Happy Fall Equinox

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud. More. We are animal not only in body but in spirit. Our minds are the minds of wild animals. Artists, who remember their wildness better than most, are animal artists, lifting their heads to sniff a quick wild scent in the air, and they know it unmistakably, they know the tug of wildness to be followed through your life is buckled by that strange and absolute obedience. ('You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,' wrote Nietzsche.) Children know it as magic and timeless play. Shamans and inveterate misbehavers know it; those who cannot trammel themselves into a sensible job and life in the suburbs know it.

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey

Equinox Thoughts

It seems as though summer has just arrived, but here we are again, nearing the eve of the autumn equinox. Slightly cooler mornings, heavy dews and falling leaves after months of blistering heat and humidity, can it be?

The autumn equinox is often observed on a fixed date (September 21st), but the astronomical coordinate this time around is Monday, September 22. Like all the old seasonal festivals, the observance begins at sundown on the night before, Sunday, September 21st. South of the equator, the natural cycles are reversed, and tomorrow is the eve of the vernal equinox (Ostara).

However and whenever we choose to observe it (or not observe it), the fall equinox is a pivotal cosmic hinge, and it wears many names: Mabon, Harvest Home, Second Harvest, the Feast of Ingathering and Alban Elfed, to name just a few. Mabon is the most common of the bunch, a modern invention taken from the name of the god Mabon (Maponus), a male fertilizing principle in Welsh mythology.

The American pagan Aidan Kelly came up with the name Mabon in the seventies when he was crafting a calendar for modern pagans and noticed the fall equinox did not have a pagan name of its own. His invention has stuck, but I like to think of the festival as "Harvest Home". It has been celebrated as such for many centuries, the title expressing the grain and harvest motifs at the heart of the occasion.

And so it goes...  Monday's observance blends modern pagan practices with the rich traditions of ancient harvest festivals. Ceres, Demeter, John Barleycorn, Lugh, Tammuz and Persephone may be better candidates for a tutelary deity presiding over autumn harvest rites, but I have a soft spot for the "Great Son" of the Mabinogion, sometimes considered (incorrectly) a companion of Arthur's Round Table. Mabon may not be a harvest god, but he is a a powerful symbol of the land's bounty.

In the old Teutonic calendar, the autumn equinox marked the beginning of the Winter Finding, a ceremonial interval lasting until Winter Night on October 15, also the date of the old Norse New Year. For moderns, the date marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. In Christian tradition, the day is associated with St. Michael the Archangel—his feast takes place a few days from now on September 25 and is known (for obvious reasons) as Michaelmas. The autumn blooming Michaelmas daisy or New England aster with its purple petals and golden heart is one of my favorite wildflowers, and I always look forward to its blooming. 

The autumn equinox is about abundance and harvest, but most of all, it is about balance and equilibrium—it is one of two astronomical coordinates in the whole turning year when day and night are perfectly balanced in length. Like all the old festivals dedicated to Mother Earth, it is a liminal or threshold time, for we are poised between two seasons, summer and autumn.

One holds out hopeful thoughts for the autumn equinox, that skies overhead will be brilliantly blue and full of singing geese by day, that trees and vines and creepers will be arrayed in crimson and gold, that a splendid golden moon will be visible against a blanket of stars by night. This year, the moon will be just past new and probably not visible to the naked eye, but no less beguiling for all that.

An autumn wreath graces our door, and a pot of chrysanthemums graces the threshold. Sometimes the pot is adorned by leaves fallen from the old oak nearby and its companion maple. The oak is our guardian, the wreath and mums a nod to the season and a tribute of sorts. Oak, fallen leaves, wreath and blooms are cheerful things, conveying a benediction on anyone who knocks at the door, treads our cobblestones or just passes by in the street.

Autumn images tug at the heart, and I always prowl through reams of archived images looking for just the right one for this day, but I am never sure I have found it. Leaves, asters, puddles, clouds, light, geese, herons??? It's always about the light, and autumn light is absolutely and incandescently fabulous.

However, and whenever you choose to celebrate the occasion, a very happy Autumn Equinox, Harvest Home, or Mabon. May good things come to you.

Friday Ramble - Going for the Gold

It's the reds that grab our attention at this time of the year. When maple trees in the eastern Ontario highlands turn in autumn, the gorges, hills and quiet coves are ablaze with color. Other trees are dazzling in their own right, but their earthier hues are always upstaged by the riotous, cavorting red maples.

There is an elemental chemistry at work in the woods. In summer, the green pigment in leaves (chlorophyll) helps converts sunlight into energy in the elegant chemical process called photosynthesis. (That word comes from the Greek phōs meaning "light", and suntíthēmi meaning "putting together".) Trees retain the carbon dioxide extracted during photosynthesis and use it to manufacture nourishment, together with water taken in through their roots. Oxygen extracted at the same time is released back into the earth's atmosphere for us to breathe.

Wild and earthy magics of the very finest kind are in progress, trees and sentient beings all breathing in and out together and sharing the bounty of light. That there is magic is without question, and it always seems to me that trees are sentient beings too, not just woody things with leaves and branches and roots.

When autumn arrives, deciduous trees withdraw into themselves. Chlorophyll production slows down, allowing the anthocyanin and carotenoid pigments also in leaves to come into their own. Leaves high in anthocyanins and low in carotenoids turn scarlet, and those with high levels of both flavinoids flash bright orange. Leaves high in carotenoids and low in anthocyanins do a sky dance in honeyed golds and yellows. Absent both anthocyanins and carotenoids, tannins rule, giving us the burnished russets, ochres, umbers and bronzes of the great oaks, hickories and beeches.

Like most northerners, I have a passion for scarlet, claret and ruby in autumn, but it always seems to me that the golds, bronzes and russets of our other native tree species don't get the attention they so richly deserve. The oro (gold) on display here in late September and early October is anything but pallido (pale or light). It dazzles the eye; it sings and struts and dances; it kicks up its heels. It rocks.

Poplars, ashes, elms and birches wear radiant saffron, and so do ginkgo trees in the village. Beech leaves are coppery coinage, and oak leaves turn an alluring rosy bronze. In Lanark, the aspens and tamaracks down by our beaver pond wear a delightful buttery gold. Nearby, late blooming goldenrod sways back and forth until it goes to seed and offers its fuzzy children to the wind. A few resolute yellow daisies and hawkweed bloom in protected nooks among the rocks. Everywhere, there is fine contrast from spruces, pines and cedars in the background, and blue-green evergreen fragrance fills the air.

And then there are all the smaller bright entities down on the forest floor among the fallen leaves. . . Eastern yellow fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) glows like a hundred watt bulb, and one can spot it in autumn as at no other time of the year. From the shadows, the lovely but poisonous fungus dishes out its frothy incandescence like a halogen lamp set on high beam.

Here's to the glorious golds of the fall panoply. When the long white season arrives and snow covers the countryside, it is the golds that will turn up in my dreams. Long may they delight these old eyes in dazzling array.

Thursday Poem - Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere

its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply

in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island of this summer,

this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering

in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed

seeds and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure

painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us

longing to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever

in these momentary pastures.

Mary Oliver,
from American Primitive

Wordless Wednesday - Fallen

For the Oaks

For every mighty oak, there was once

an acorn that held its ground.

 

In September, every garment in my closet has acorns in its pockets, seasonal offerings from the magnificent oaks of the eastern Ontario Highlands, from red oaks and white oaks and burr oaks. There are other species of oak in the province of course, but these are the oaks of my native place, and I think of them as my sisters.

On sunny autumn days, I find a comfortable seat among my kin, and we have long conversations, some of the most thoughtful and enlightening discussions ever. I have no leaves, and I don't bear acorns, but the great oaks welcome me nevertheless.

Pockets without acorns rattling around in their depths enfold other offerings, pine cones, walnuts, beech nuts, hickory nuts and conkers (horse chestnuts). I adore their shapes, their colors, their textures, their fragrance, the whole season of their fruiting, and I can never resist gathering them out in the woods.

Autumn is a season of entelechy, a time of becoming, a time of of once and future trees. How magical, that the little wonders I am carrying home will be towering trees in the woods long after my spirit has boogied off, and my mortal husk has been composted in some fashion or other. Vast amounts of information and creative will are stored within acorns' tiny, elegant shapes. Form, function, beauty, they have it all. 

Turning my pockets out this weekend before chucking everything into the washing machine, I realized that there has been a whole forest riding around with me for several days, and it made me smile. No need to pine for my tree sisters when I am away from the woods - they are right here with me.

Sequestered, Week 312 (CCCXII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mixed with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,

Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Standing in the Light

Friday Ramble - Autumn

This week's word comes to us through the Middle English autumpne and Old French autompne, thence the Latin autumnus. The Latin likely hails from even older Etruscan forms. The first part of autumnus (autu) may originate in the Etruscan autu, related to avil, or year, the second part (mnus) from menos meaning loss, minus, or passing. There we have it. At the end of our etymological adventures is the burnished but wistful thought that another year is ebbing, another circling in what I like to call simply, "the Great Round," the natural cycle of our existence.

September is about harvest and abundance, but it is about balance too. The Autumn Equinox on September 21 is one of the two times in the year when day and night are balanced in length. On that day, (also called "Harvest Home" or sometimes Mabon), the sun seems to pass over the equator on a journey southward, moving steadily away from us. Things are actually the other way around of course, and it is the earth and her unruly children who are in motion. Between the Midsummer Solstice and the Winter Solstice, our planet's northern hemisphere tilts away from the radiant star at its center, and we northerners go along for the ride.

The magnificent constellations of winter are starting to appear, and the dome of night is a treasure trove of deep sky wonders, a gift for stargazey types like this Old Thing. Beau and I were out stargazing last night, and this morning we were out again before dawn, the waning moon shining over our heads. When the sun rose, the stars vanished and every roof in the village was sewn with sequins of dew. With mornings like this, how can one feel anything except rich as Croesus and jubilant in spirit?

On early walks, fallen leaves drift around our ankles and make a fine rustling music. Earthbound foliage on the trail is going transparent and turning into stained glass in splendid buttery colors. We pause to look at all the wonders around our feet, and it's a wonder we ever get anywhere at all. When I stopped to look at yet another leaf in the path on our early walk, Beau sighed and looked up at me curiously. I started to say that I was looking for a perfect leaf, then stopped and started the sentence over again. Every single autumn leaf is perfect, just as it is.

Thursday Poem - At the road's turning, a sign

Stranger, you have reached a fabulous land―
in winter, the abode of swans,
magnolia buds and black leaves

secretly feeding the earth―
memory snaked into tree roots.

In spring, you will feel life changes
bubble up in your blood like early wine,
and your heart will be lighter than
the flight of gossamer pollen.

Stranger, in summer, you will drink deeply
of a curious local wine,
fortified with herbs cut with a silver knife
when the moon was new.
Who knows what freedoms
will dazzle your path like fireflies?

And I promise you, in the fall
you will give up the search and know peace
in the fragrance of apple wood burning.
You will learn how to accept love
in all its masks, and the universe
will sing here more sweetly than any other place

Dolores Stewart, from The Nature of Things
(February,1931 - May, 2017)

My friend was a wonderful storyteller and a fine poet. It is hard to believe it has been eight years since she left us and went on ahead.

Wordless Wednesday - Bumble Girl in the Gold

Pot of Gold

Recipe books rest on every flat surface, a sure sign that days are getting cooler and autumn is on its way. There are local vegetables everywhere, and they cry out to come home in one's basket, for careful attention and a spell of imaginative culinary alchemy. Ritual undertakings? Oh yes, kitchen magics are afoot. 

There is nothing better than a bowl of homemade soup on a cool night, and hallelujah, it is finally cool enough in the house for cooking. One of this week's exercises was a curried squash soup which was shared with a dear friend for lunch yesterday, and she took two containers home for lunches at work. When I make this recipe for the tribe, there is seldom anything left for me, but dinner last night was a small bowl of liquid gold with a sprinkle of paprika and a frill of rosemary from the pot on the deck. Yum. I could have been dining in a cordon bleu restaurant, it was that good.

On the weekend, a large cauliflower came home from a local farmer's market, and roasted cauliflower soup is next on the menu. It will be followed by a crock pot of sweet potato and black bean soup. Since the Roma tomatoes in my garden are finally starting to ripen, there will be a nice batch of minestrone early next week.

There is something uplifting about turning veggie odds and ends into a cauldron of something tasty and nutritious. It feels good to be stirring the pot again.

Sequestered, Week 311 (CCCXI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure. 

Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

A Bowl of Red

The first Macintosh apples of the season. Hallelujah!

Friday Ramble - Drifting Along in the Fog

On September mornings, the village is often a mysterious place, the earth warmer than the air above and the meeting of the two elements turning otherwise mundane landscape features into entities fey and luminous. Autumn is upon us, and she is comfortable in her tenure of mist, rain, wind and madcap, tumbling leaves.

There is nothing like a good fog, and September dishes up some splendid atmospheric murks. Mist swirls around everything in the village, draping whiskery trees, power lines, and the telephone poles that poke out of it like the masts of sailing ships. It smooths the edges of everything and rounds the contours of house and street.

The wind scours leaves from the old trees near home, and they rustle underfoot as Beau and I wander along on our early walks. If we listen carefully, we can sometimes hear Cassie and Spencer walking beside us, their happy feet doing a kind of scuffling dance through the fallen, leafy treasure. My departed soulmate loved early morning rambles, and he is always tucked in my pocket when we go out.

Out of the pearly gray and sepia come sounds now and again. Birds converse in village hedgerows and geese move unseen among the clouds, singing as they pass over our heads. Doors open and close as sleepy residents collect their morning papers. There is the soft growling of automobiles and the rattle and hum of city buses, the muffled cadence of joggers gliding through the park, commuters heading downtown to work, children chattering on their way to school.

Once in a while, there is the whistle of a faraway train, usually only a faint echoing in the air. The sound brings back childhood memories of freight trains rumbling through the countryside in the wee hours of the morning and sounding their horns in warning as they approached crossings. Raindrops beat a staccato rhythm on the roofs of houses near home, and little rivers sing through the gutters with their freight of leaves and twigs. Taken all together, it is atmospheric and symphonic.

On such mornings, the world seems boundless and brimming with luminous possibility, soil and trees and sky and mist giving tongue in a language that is wild and compelling. Part of me is curled up in the warm with a mug of something hot and a good book. Other parts are out there drifting along with the fog and happy to be doing it. 

Thursday Poem - September Mosaic

Before we come with rakes and crackling

energy to clean it up,

the backyard is precisely

as the dog prefers it -- left alone,

a natural selection

of leaf, stick, bone, pod, seed, and stone.

But we are cosmic instruments

of music and disturbance, only

animals by half,

and will not let the season bleed

its shifting earth designs

of stone, bone, leaf, stick, pod, and seed.

Some earthscapes rearranged

are gardens, or hillsides

shorn to make a path for wired poles

or graveyards stiff with grief

or clearcut forests. Let me take care

of seed, stone, pod, bone, stick, and leaf.

Let me recall the universe

is breathing in my breath, it plays

its tune in me, it dreams my being --

an unnamed, unrecorded god

becoming conscious as I am

of leaf, seed, stick, stone, bone, and pod.

I am a painting made of sand and pollen.

Structure and spirit

are my codes. Nothing of life

is random or a trick

I draw myself a part of all

with pod, leaf, bone, seed, stone, and stick

The circle of the seasons turns

and never comes back quite the same.

Fertile impulses in time

will overgrow the patterns I have sown,

return to animal wilderness

of stick, pod, stone, leaf, seed and bone.

Let me be glad

new seasons bud from stick and leaf,

new forces split a pod and spill the seed,

new rhythms rise from stone and bone.

Dolores Stewart, Doors to the Universe
She was my friend, and I miss her.

Wordless Wednesday - Mellow Yellow